Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to freaky

Yeah, this is where it gets strange...
SDAI-Tech1 — (archived)

Let's just say I lived in that "region" and fate had it that I played in the park dozens of times when I was too young to even pronounce "El-Do-ra-do" properly. My dad worked in the area and sometimes he would take me to the park to play after he got off work.

Right next to the rocket ship was a merry-go-round...remember that? And the rocket had a slide that pointed to it. You could slide down the rocket slide and in a heart beat start spinning the good ol' fashioned corrugated metal merry-go-round which had handles that would knock one senseless if one was not careful when someone else was spinning it and one tried to jump on. The slide came out at the second level I think but one could continue up a level to where the big metal spinning navigation wheel was. To paraphrase Jim Belushi in Mr. Destiny "Is that the sort of info you can get from spies, Google or satellite imagery?"

No, I don't make up stuff about California, I just paid close attention to things when I was young and it still lives with me. I never caught fish in El Dorado Lake, though I vaguely remember something about them..but I remember they were tiny. Were they grunion?

I did play on that playground, probably ten or more years after you played on it. The rocket was slightly loose at that point and wobbled just a bit when kids went crazy inside it. When ten or fifteeen kids were squished inside getting claustrophobic in the cage structure, shaking it, I sometimes think its a miracle it didn't completely come off its foundations and tip over, crushing bones and little bodies inside. I've forgotten a lot about the park, but that rocket to me was that park and I remember it and the "merry-go-round of pain" quite well. Of course, the last time I saw it was circa 1973 - a long, long time ago.

Knowing that, you too, might've commanded the rocket ship in El Dorado park is just too freaky.

But it let's me know where you're coming from.

Long Beach, last time I was there in the late nineties, had pretty much fully succumbed to "diversity" and was one of the areas partially taken over during the King riots. The playground is probably long since torn out and the park a magnet for crime and drug deals.

But it still exists in the mind and proves what a tiny, tiny world this really is...and how shared frequency relationship brings people together in different ways.

;-)

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